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Sunday, 27 July 2014

The bits and bytes of being an IT engineer in India...

Yeah, I am an engineer...more so an IT engineer. One of those million faces in the bandwagon that started rolling somewhere in the early 90's and has now become a major face of |India's economic growth. There is no denying the fact that the Indian IT industry is a major contributor to the country's GDP as well as its reputation for skilled workforce in the international arena.But once we go down deeper, brushing aside the statistics and numbers, there we find a much humble, if not sorry, picture of an individual spending his entire youth , writing away lines and lines of code and then re-writing most of it . Yes, the IT engineer himself. He is no superhero but someone super-humanly over-working and multi-tasking (read : slogging for hours , juggling between code, spread-sheets, tools and of course yes, Google, to meet the deadly deadlines). Yet unlike the doctors or even his engineering brethren from other fields like civil or mechanical, the society does not have the slightest clue of what he actually does, leave alone having any regards for his efforts. Even his family members spend pensive hours at night wondering what sort of lawful work extend to such unearthly hours when most of their neighbors are either sleeping or weeping over the latest episode of the popular TV soap !!But this guy was once a dreamer. Armed with a geeky attitude towards life and the picture of a Matrix-like world, he had set out to create something brilliant that would save humanity someday. Slowly and slowly he had equipped himself with the various languages understood by the computers. Be it C, Java , Python or Oracle, there was no stopping him. He felt himself to be just a step away from becoming the next Tony Stark alias The Iron Man !!And then something happened. Something seemingly exciting at first but supposedly sure to disappoint later happened...he got a JOB !! And overnight , the dreamer posed to change the world with he strokes of his keyboard finds himself encapsulated in the abstract world of a cubicle. There he learns the norms and rules of this new world and by the time he comes to his own, the passionate dreamer morphs into a deadline-chasing machine. His dreams squandered and ideas under-rated, the guy gets programmed to perform the same tasks, day after day and then getting assigned some other task, perform it day after day.

And among all these, the fear of being labelled an under-performer looms all the time. There are also frequent rumors of downsizing going around in the office canteen. So he postpones his plans for the weekend to the next weekend , only to postpone them again to the next. He loses track of important dates like birthdays and anniverseries and gives family functions a miss. He slogs and slogs harder to get those few extra bucks to sustain a decent livelihood. After all, the society still knows he is an ENGINEER !!